How winning the lottery affects happiness, according to psychology research

A woman buying a Powerball lottery ticket at a store in Penn Station in New York City.

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At 10:59 p.m. ET on Wednesday, a lucky winner could
take home the $700 million Powerball jackpot.Most people assume winning would make them happier, but
some research indicates lottery winners struggle to enjoy
everyday pleasures.Some researchers think people have a set point for
happiness and big changes don't affect it as much as we
imagine.

You know what sounds pretty great? Finding out that you've won
the $700 million Powerball
jackpot.

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The lump sum minus taxes yields about $293 million to play with,
depending on where you live. Divide that by two or three to
account for multiple winners, and it's still a ton of money.
Buying a ticket
may not be a financially rational decision, but you'd imagine
that winning even a chunk of that money would make you super
happy - right?

If you're not happy already, winning the lottery might not make a
difference in the long term.

The psychology of rolling in piles of cash

There's some fascinating research on the psychology of lotteries.
Studies have found that people are compelled to buy tickets
because
we have a hard time processing just how unlikely a win is and
give ourselves reasons to think we could somehow win.

Some research has also suggested that the desire to play the
lottery may be stronger among people with lower incomes who hope
to escape difficult financial circumstances.

But perhaps most interestingly, research indicates that winning
the lottery doesn't make people happier in the long term.
Contrary to popular belief, however, it doesn't
seem to make people more likely to go on spending sprees that
leave them broken and unhappy either.

Winners mostly report ending up about as happy as they were
before winning.

A classic
1978 study on this compared 22 lottery winners with 22
control-group members (who didn't win any money) and 29 people
who were paralyzed in accidents.

In general, the lottery winners reported being happier than the
people with paraplegia or quadriplegia - a 4 out of 5 versus a
2.96 out of 5. The control group averaged 3.82 out of 5, not
significantly different from lottery winners. However, lottery
winners reported getting the least enjoyment from what
researchers called "mundane pleasures" - enjoyable aspects of
everyday life like eating breakfast or talking with a friend.

Researchers were surprised that lottery winners didn't report
being significantly happier than non-winners, and that the
average among people who had been in accidents was above the
scale's midpoint. Overall, winning the lottery didn't increase
happiness as much as others thought it would, and a catastrophic
accident didn't make people as unhappy as one might expect.

"Eventually, the thrill of winning the lottery will itself wear
off. If all things are judged by the extent to which they depart
from a baseline of past experience, gradually even the most
positive events will cease to have impact as they themselves are
absorbed into the new baseline against which further events are
judged. Thus, as lottery winners become accustomed to the
additional pleasures made possible by their new wealth, these
pleasures should be experienced as less intense and should no
longer contribute very much to their general level of happiness."

The concept at play here is called hedonic adaptation. People
have been shown to return to a kind of set point of happiness
after events that we assume will have a big effect on how we
feel.

"Some of us have our thermostat set to happy. Some are set to
depressed. Meanwhile, others are somewhere in between," the
psychologist Robert Puff
wrote in Psychology Today. "When we experience a major event,
say winning the lottery or becoming paralyzed, our thermostat may
temporarily swing up or down. But over time, it returns to its
usual setting."

There are things that we can do to
influence our happiness, however, including cultivating
strong relationships, spending time and money on fun experiences,
and exercising. Perhaps a lucky lottery winner could devote their
newfound wealth to those sorts of goals. But winning itself
doesn't seem to be enough to boost happiness in the long term.

Still, it's pretty fun to imagine what that money could be used
for - a mental state some psychologists say is
perhaps the best reason to play the lottery in the first
place.